File:Blue WISE Pleiades (27094012472).png

English: Ah, it is finally done! This one took a few days. Here are the lovely Pleiades and their associated filaments and clumps of dust. To their south is a diffuse warm glow known as the zodiacal light. I am very impressed by how bright it is in this picture and the dynamic range with which it presents. In visible light, it's often barely discernible if you can even find skies dark enough to view it. It's bright enough in infrared to pose a bit of a nuisance to astronomers, but in this case I think it is wonderful.

If you are familiar with WISE, you know it's an infrared observatory, and this image may not look anything like what you might expect from it. WISE image releases typically look like this. While useful, they're not particularly pretty, and they might have even turned off a lot of people from infrared imagery. I've definitely seen a general lack of interest in infrared imagery and have even seen more than a few people express displeasure about JWST being an infrared telescope, fearing all the images will be... well, ugly.

Worry not, fellow humans! JWST will produce beautiful images and they need not be presented in weirdo colors. This particular image has only one special processing trick beyond what I normally do. After some careful consideration I decided to reverse the wavelength order. I nearly always put the shortest wavelength in the blue channel and the longest in the red. This time, I did the opposite. I was afraid that cognitive bias would prevent people from enjoying this image if it was a fiery red, given the extreme familiarity the astronomy community has with the Pleiades. Sometimes you've got to do something unconventional to get the result you want.

Processing notes: Thankfully, most of the processing work was aligning and matching up each of the frames to one another. This is fairly tedious work, but it's not nearly as bad as dealing with cosmic rays. There were a few annuluses to deal with near some of the brighter stars, but they only took about 15 minutes to be rid of. I did not saturate the colors or apply any sort of sharpening.

Red: W1 (3.4 μm) Yellow-Green: W2 (4.6 μm) Cyan: W3 (12 μm) Blue: W4 (22 μm)

North is up.